mise en abymn. An artistic technique in which an image contains a smaller image of itself. Also, the visual effect of standing between two mirrors so that the image recurs infinitely. Literally, “placed in the abyss.”

Bambi trots through the abyss to make sure the Duck boys have their lunch.

My first experience of mise en abym was carrying this lunchbox to school in 1978.

The University of Chicago Press makes a different e-book available free every month. For October, it’s “Thirty Years of Phoenix Poets: 1983 – 2012,” a sampler of 30 poems, one from each year that the well-regarded Phoenix Poets series has been publishing.

To get yours, click here, and follow the instructions. If you’re a Kindle user, you’ll find it in the Kindle bookstore. Enjoy!

Inexperienced writers use lots of cliches. So I tell my students things like: “Don’t use a comparison if you’ve heard it before. Your reader will have heard it too, probably, and will zoom over it without thinking much about what you’re trying to show them.” Maybe they’ve heard that before, considering how often they don’t seem to think much about what I’m trying to show them.

In any movie or television show in which a character is shown carrying groceries, a big loaf of french bread is invariably seen peeking out over the top of the bag.

And that baguette is there for a reason. For one thing, it’s a convenient prop that is unlikely to wilt under hot studio lights or after hours spent on location. It’s also a handy bit of narrative shorthand. If we see a character carrying a paper bag without any clues about what it contains, we immediately start to wonder what might be inside. The baguette poking out over the top is a visual flag that, paradoxically, actually makes the bag less visible: as soon as we understand that it’s just a bag of groceries, we stop worrying about it.

That’s it! Any image, any figure of speech, any phrase that our readers notice so casually and familiarly that they don’t care what else is in there, they don’t worry about it. If the sack of groceries is incidental, go ahead, stick a baguette in it. But if. There’s. Something. In. That. Sack, by golly, make sure it’s not french bread showing.

(Now, off to use this baguette metaphor–Baguettaphor? Sure!–so often my students ignore everything else in my bag…)

Nashville’s Husky Jackal Theater mashes up the 1590s and 1990s in William Shakespeare Presents Terminator the Second, the story of a boy and his cyborg protector. Every line is from the plays of William Shakespeare; only proper nouns, pronouns and verb tenses were changed.

According to io9, the full play debuted at the Nashville School of the Arts in October 2011, and a DVD of the performance is in post-production now. That film will be available for download on November 1st.

In 2010, Dublin was appointed a UNESCO “City of Literature.” In honor of this, a postage stamp was commissioned. When the stamp was released earlier this year, it was unlike other literary stamps. It didn’t feature a physical landmark, an illustration from a novel, or a writer’s portrait; it featured a complete, new story by Eoin Moore.